The invention relates to pallets made of all paper products which serve as bases for unitized loads of products which are adapted for handling by forklift devices.
Since about the turn of the century the wooden shipping pallet has been the cornerstone of materials handling. It has long been recognized that the wooden pallet is too heavy, bulky, and tremendously wasteful of increasingly scarce forest resources. For over fifty years attempts have been made to provide improved alternatives to the wooden pallet. At the present time the slip sheet is the most widely used alternative to the wooden pallet, although other pallet designs, such as the all paper device shown in U.S. Pat Nos. 5,111,754 and 5,291,837, and composite wood/paper constructions have achieved some market penetration. However, the wooden pallet continues to dominate the materials handling market.